


All the Stars in the Sky

by Taselby



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - The Wrath of Heaven, Gen, POV Cullen Rutherford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 00:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20073460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taselby/pseuds/Taselby
Summary: "Where do you go to run from thesky?” The Herald waves a hand, the marked one, sparking green in the dark. “From yourself?”In the morning the Herald will be escorted to the ruined temple to close the breach, and Maker willing, this particular horror will be ended. It's no wonder none of them can sleep.This is set in the same timeline asThe Rainwater Well, but well in advance of those events.NOW WITH ART BY LINNPUZZLE!!





	All the Stars in the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> 12/07/2019: Updated with art from @linnpuzzle!!! She's the BEST!
> 
> Thank you to @linnpuzzle for beta. She makes everything better.
> 
> Title is from the Chant of Light

Cullen knows he should be sleeping, but the small stove in his tent went out hours ago, and the cold is too much and the blankets are too heavy, and everything aches besides. It’s some time yet until dawn, and if he has to be cold and miserable, he might as well walk the camp.

Haven isn’t ever really quiet, but there is a certain lull that falls in the small hours. He likes it when everything is reduced to the smell of snow and woodsmoke, the murmur of the watch, and the lonely call of the occasional bird. It’s soothing, easing the tightness of his neck and back. Tonight is just as quiet, but it’s the hush of a held breath, tense with anticipation, and isn’t calming at all. 

Soldiers cluster in small groups, tending gear and sharpening weapons, speaking too softly for him to hear. It’s itchy under his skin in all the wrong ways and he wants to fight, wants to run, but there is nowhere to run from the breach in the sky. He consoles himself that tomorrow they will escort the Herald to the breach, and Maker willing, that particular horror will be ended.

Backlit by a fire, two scouts are having a heated discussion. They keep looking over at him, and he’s just about to go over and see to the matter when one turns in his direction.

“Commander!” The scout bounces across the snow toward him, boots crunching, kicking up little puffs of white behind him in his haste. Cullen adds it to the list of things that make him tired in his bones: the gulf of skill that yet eludes their people here in this fledgling Inquisition. A year ago, five years ago, he would have turned fully half of them away as too green to bother training at all, and now… Now he can only shake his head at the task the Maker has set him, and hope that he is strong enough to see it through.

“Ser! Jada asked me to…” 

Cullen turns, weary and frustrated at the lack of discipline. The scout stops, standing too close and looking at him too directly, blinking confusedly. Maker’s mercy, he looks more like a training dummy than a person, swaddled in so many layers of coats and scarves that it’s a wonder he can move at all. Cullen crosses his arms and tips his chin down to stare at him, waiting. The angle does no favors for the pounding in his head or the ache behind his eyes. 

After too long a moment the scout stumbles half a step back — _better_ — and tries again. “Sorry, ser. _Sergeant_ Jada wanted me to tell… wished to inform you…”

“Out with it, man.”

The body language loosens, breath huffing, and it’s the cant of his shoulders that finally lets Cullen put a name to the voice. Edred. An archer with some potential, if he can ever find his manners half so well as he finds a target. “_Ser_. Jada said the Herald is across the lake, just sitting there, like.” Edred points toward a copse of trees, black against the dark sky. “There, ser.”

He can’t see anything from here, and wishes, just for a moment, that he’d stayed in his tent. Honestly, if Lavellan wants to sit in the frozen dark… Cullen sighs. The cold is good on his face and clean on his tongue, and he was walking anyway. Along the lake is as good a path as any, and if he should see Lavellan, well. He will deal with that as it comes. “Very well,” he says finally, “I will see to it,” and turns toward the lake path, trusting that the dismissal was clear enough. 

Behind him, Edred’s boots crunch off into the distance.

Cullen makes his way around the edge of the camp, waving down anyone who tries to stand at attention. It’s not his intention to disturb the men tonight; he likes seeing the troops, if they can be can be called that yet, but even at best his presence is disruptive. 

The path takes him along the outer wall and behind the palisade fence into the mages’ camp, such as it is. A haphazard clustering of tents along the path and up the hillside as far as anyone has been able to carve out level places for them, overfull with desperate and frightened mages, all bathed in the sickly light of the sundered veil. It’s close enough to Kirkwall to make his neck itch.

Between the tents he can see some of the younger apprentices gathered around a small fire, one of many that dot the encampment, cheerfully tossing magelights back and forth in some improvised game. 

He feels so very tired sometimes.

The mages are their allies now. That in itself is troubling enough, but there are so many of them, easily the numbers of a small Circle, and not half enough templars to guard against the dangers they pose. The very sky is spitting demons at them and Haven is soaked in magic; abominations are all but inevitable. Never mind the sheer logistical nightmare of trying to feed and house so many. At some point in the past week the mages had stopped being _mages_ and become just another set of problems to be sorted. More shelter, more food, more space. Thank the Maker, at least clean water is abundant.

There is a terrible pressure behind his eyes, and worse than that is the hot, hollow feeling in his chest at the thought that this may never end, that all of this struggle to be free of the Chantry, of the Order, might be for nothing. Because it’s not getting better. How naive he’d been to think that those initial weeks after he’d left Kirkwall and the Templars behind would be the worst of it. He didn’t envision the weeks — months — of difficulty that came and went in waves. It was unpredictable. He would be fine, hale even, for a month or so, and then without warning spend days unable even to keep down water.

Headaches, pain, sleeplessness, fatigue… the worst of it is the way his hands shake. That’s the hardest to conceal, and what he most fears being noticed as a sign of his weakness. His unfitness for command. Ironic that in his effort to master himself and his own fate, he may well lose his position here — the very thing that made his freedom possible. 

Presuming he survives the withdrawal, of course.

Beyond the palisade gates it’s quiet enough that Cullen can almost pretend that he’s alone, really alone here with the trees and the frozen lake, the muffled crunch of his boots. It stopped snowing some time ago, but wayward flakes continue to blow across the ice in little swirls of white. _Green_. The moon should have painted everything black and silver, except now the breach has ruined that, too, and cast its sickly light over the landscape.

He turns away from the ice and takes the longer path behind the old pier and up through the deeper snow. Meltwater seeps into his boots where his trousers are tucked, cold against his legs.

Cullen respects Lavellan’s work, but can’t warm to the man on a personal level. He is cold and as Sera put it, _elfy_, inscrutable and distant with everyone. Even the apostate, Solas, doesn’t seem to get along well with him.

He can’t think of who Lavellan actually does get along with. Varric maybe, but the dwarf seems to get on well enough with anyone he can mine fresh material for his novels from. Aveline has probably taken out a contract on him, between _Hard in Hightown_ and _Swords and Shields_, though Cullen will never admit to having read either. 

The Tevinter, Pavus. He’s seen them together often, sitting close and talking quietly. Sharing meals. They’ve been all but inseparable since returning from Redcliffe in advance of the rebel mages. Cullen pauses to correct himself firmly. Their mage _allies_. The mages were free now, apostates all, at least for as long as… as what? Until the war is over? Until there’s a new Divine to resurrect the broken Templar Order, to reinstate the circles? Until the sky is healed and this new darkness lay defeated at their feet? Maker. All of it is impossible. 

He turns up the slope toward the trees, boots creaking in the fresh snow.

Lavellan is seated in the snow, another shadow between the pines, the flicker of green from the mark on his hand an uneasy echo of the breach. Cullen doesn’t bother to quiet his steps, letting the crunch-creak announce him as he approaches. Haven looks small and fragile from here, the ruddy circles of watch fires and sprawling assortment of camps — refugees, soldiers, mages, the few templars who had thought to keep themselves apart — running together until no clear distinction remained. Too many people in too little space. His mind turns on the problem.

There are a soft plumes of smoke rising from the kitchen chimneys. Cullen imagines that if the wind turned just now, he might catch the smell of fresh bread.

Lavellan is so still that Cullen isn’t even certain the man is breathing, let alone aware of his presence. _Elfy_, says Sera’s voice in his head.

“If I were going to flee, I would have done so in Redcliffe,” Lavellan says without looking up.

The honesty is so direct and unexpected that Cullen looks down at the top of the his head. His braid is tight enough that Cullen’s head gives a sympathetic throb, the neat coils dark with melted snow. A few loose strands cling wetly to his pale neck. His grip flexes on the staff laid across his knees. “That was not my first concern, Your Worship. It’s not safe for you so far from the gates.”

Lavellan draws a breath at the honorific, silently, noticeable only in the lift of his shoulders. It’s a tired discussion, and Cullen can see him drawing himself up for a fresh round of denials. And can also see the moment he lets it go, breath pluming white in the dark. “Your soldiers patrol well beyond this point, and I am capable of defending myself if need be,” he says, adjusting his staff. 

It’s clearly a dismissal. Cullen sets his jaw, torn between the duty to protect their best—only—hope of closing the breach and the desire to follow an implicit order and leave the man to whatever thoughts have chased him from his rest. Beyond that, Cullen will not admit to a baser urge to take himself away from the foreign mage.

It’s only as he shifts, preparing to go, that he notices Lavellan’s bare feet, and realizes how thinly the man is dressed. “Aren’t you cold?” he asks.

At that, Lavellan finally turns to look at him, eyes tarnished bronze in the green light, gaze flicking over him. “Are you?”

Yes, but that isn’t really the point. Cullen is at least dressed for the weather, with a heavy cloak and extra layers under his armor. Never mind that he can’t feel his nose, and the icy edge of his gorget is pressing against his throat. He wriggles his toes inside his boots, warm enough inside two pairs of woolen socks. His feet are sore, all of him is sore, and if it were just the aches of a hard day on the training grounds, he could call himself satisfied.

Lavellan is looking at him as if he expects an answer, and Cullen cannot get past how unnerving his gaze is. His eyes are too large, too heavily kohled against the pallor of his skin. He doesn’t blink enough. It makes Cullen restless, like he needs to move to make up for the Lavellan’s stillness. “Why didn’t you run in Redcliffe?” Or when he’d gone to seek out Mother Giselle, or in Val Royeaux, or any other time he’s been away from Haven.

Lavellan stares at him for a long moment before turning away, face tipped up to the dark obsidian of the sky. He closes his eyes and, impossibly, sits straighter, squaring his shoulders. “I apologize. I’m not fit company tonight.”

_Maker’s breath_. If the dismissal was clear before, it is all but explicit now. He’s still not entirely clear on the nature of their relationship. Lavellan is neither superior nor subordinate, and does not fit neatly into the Inquisition’s hierarchy of leadership.

The snow creaks under his boots as he shifts his weight and pulls his cloak higher around his neck. The fur mantle of his surcoat, cold and caked with snow, brushes against his jaw, catching in his beard. He needs to shave again. He hopes his hands are steady enough.

“I had thought you would be resting,” Cullen says carefully. Lavellan _should_ be resting. Closing the first rift at the temple had left him half-dead and unconscious for days. Who can say what price the breach itself will demand of him? 

“I imagine I’ll have my rest afterward,” he says, looking out over Haven. Too many tents glowing softly in the darkness, half the camp restless and wakeful, the anticipation a palpable thing. “And yourself? Are you up late or early? Surely the Commander of our armies subsists on more than tea and paperwork.”

Cullen chuffs, not quite a laugh. “Not much more than that, I’m afraid. As to our forces, they are not an army yet, but with hard work and the Maker’s blessing, they will be.”

“Hm. With a little luck, after tomorrow… _today_, they won’t be needed.”

“Maker make it so.” Snow falls from the trees with a muffled thump. Cullen’s face is stiff with cold. He can’t stop looking at Lavellan’s feet, long and fine-boned, his toes bare and white against the snow. Vulnerable. He wonders if this is an elf thing or a mage thing, or perhaps something particular to Lavellan. Except he’s known mages most of his life, and they bundle for the cold like everyone else. The elves he’s known… they were few enough, and generations living in cities. Maybe it’s a quirk of the Dalish after all.

Lavellan catches him looking. “You fret for nothing. The cold will not bother me for some time.”

Cullen makes to apologize for the intrusion, however small, but Lavellan waves him off before he can so much as take a breath. He reaches for a hand up out of the hollow pressed into the snow where he sits. Cullen takes his hand, the unmarked one, not so much pulling him up as providing a sturdy place where Lavellan can leverage his own strength. 

He is surprisingly solid for an elf. Huh.

Lavellan sighs, the plume of his breath hanging in the air. “I won’t deny that the thought occurred,” he says, planting his staff and shaking the snow from his robes. “Running. But where do you go to run from the _sky_?” He waves a hand, the marked one, sparking green in the dark. “From yourself?”

“None of us would have blamed you if you had.” It’s not truly a lie. Of course they would have understood, even as they used every skill they possessed to convince him to return.

“Why are you here, Commander? It cannot be for duty’s sake alone. The Templars surely had a greater claim on your fealty, and you left them behind.”

Cullen’s not sure he can ever leave the Templars behind him, not completely. After so many years of service their tenets are etched into his very bones. That, and the pull of the lyrium.

He’d always wanted to be a _good_ templar, but his ideas about what that means keep changing. It is no longer enough to simply follow orders and sing the Chant. Maybe the only way he can be a good templar anymore is to not be a templar at all. That thought is depressing, that the Order is so irredeemably corrupt that he serves its… _his_ principles best when separated from it.

He feels hollowed out, tired. Perhaps when this is over, he too will have his rest.

Lavellan flicks his gaze over Cullen’s face, seeming satisfied with what he finds there, and turns them back around the frozen lake, toward the village and its pools of light.

As they step from the shadows into the green light of the breach, Lavellan says, “You never asked. About your fate in the dark future that Dorian and I saw.”

And no, Cullen hadn’t asked. Didn’t really see the point in it, truthfully. Either they would succeed, and that future would never come to pass, or else they’d fail and… And it didn’t really matter then, did it? He’s never been especially concerned with how he’ll die. “It doesn’t seem relevant, Your Worship.”

The Herald looks at him oddly, considering, eyes nearly on a level with Cullen. He doesn’t believe he’s ever really paid attention to how tall the man is. Nearly Cullen’s height, though some of that may be that his bare feet don’t sink as deeply into the snow as Cullen’s boots. He thinks to look again when they’re back inside the gates, and almost immediately discards the idea as silly. It doesn’t matter how tall the Herald is in body, when Cullen is half-convinced he walks with Andraste herself beside him.

“Commander, I don’t…” he stops Cullen with a touch of fingers on his vambrace, just at the edge of the Templar insignia there, and looks at Cullen with that unblinking directness. “If anything should happen to me, I need for you to not give up hope.”

It’s unexpected, personal, shocking in its intimacy.

“The Inquisition… its purpose didn’t begin with me.” The Herald holds up his hand and the mark flares, shimmering waves of green light. “There is work yet beyond what this can do.”

At once Cullen wants to know what the Herald saw in that dark future, and is absolutely certain he doesn’t. He wants to be able to offer reassurance that today will go well. That the breach will be closed, and all the smaller rifts will seal themselves, and that this darkness will be utterly snuffed from existence.

And flowers across Thedas will bloom in celebration of this feat. He rubs at the back of his neck. “Do not discount your own contribution, Herald. However the Inquisition may have started, you are now as much a part as any of us.”

The apprentices have stopped playing their game with the mage lights, and most of the tents in the soldiers’ camp are dark now, but the day will be upon them all too soon. He can’t see any stars, washed out as they are between the breach and the wide silver disk of the moon. The sky is a featureless lid set over the world, save only the vortex of cloud surrounding the breach, and the stones inexplicably caught in the maelstrom. Will the stones fall when they close the breach, or will they vanish into the fade? The Herald has walked in the fade and emerged changed. How much, Cullen can’t say, but the mark on his hand is enough of a clue — he’s never known any scar on the body that left no like mark on the spirit.

And the mark is nothing if not profound.

_ _At the edge of the soldiers’ camp the Herald pauses. “Will you rest now, Commander? I am as secure as walls can make me, and unlikely to flee. Your task here is done.”__

_ __ _

_ __ _

Cullen hesitates. An easy lie would make this simpler. _Yes_, he will sleep now. _No_, there is no more work for him this night. All will be well. Instead, he thinks of the uncertain welcome of his cot and the table that serves in lieu of a desk, piled with stacks of reports and requisitions. An easy distraction and convenient excuse. Patient disbelief is written across the Herald’s face, as though waiting for a child to spin a story. Cullen doesn’t bother trying. He is skilled in evading the truth, a necessary ability for anyone in a position of command, but outright falsehood has never been his strength. He says nothing.

The Herald hums thoughtfully. “Come then. We’ll see if the cook has set aside some apple pastry as she promised. There should be enough for two.” He gestures for Cullen to follow him through the gates and toward the warm smell of baking bread.


End file.
